Husband Hunters (20 page)

Annabel and Daniela each put an arm around Clementine.

‘Don’t worry,’ Dani told her, ‘I’m sure there’s a very agreeable pyromaniac out there just waiting for someone to accept him for who he is.’

Clementine laughed through her tears. She wiped her eyes and brushed her hair out of her face.

‘Tonight we’re going to take matters into our own hands.’ She pulled out a compact, wiped away the black tear stains, then she re-applied her mascara. She flicked the brush in a sharp stabbing motion.

‘We’re going to take control,’ she said.

She glanced quickly around the room, waited until the teacher’s back was turned, then wound her arm up like a baseball pitcher and whacked the chopping board of onion pieces she’d diced moments earlier. Tiny white tiles of onion rained down on the floor.

‘Oh dear.’ Clementine fell to her knees and began scraping up the mess with her fingers. Two of their neighbours, including the tall Greek man, bent down to help her.

‘I can’t believe I did that,’ she said to the brown-eyed man. ‘I’m normally not clumsy at all.’

Dani smirked at Annabel.

After the mess had been cleared up, Clem asked the Greek man — Alastair — if he had an onion to spare. Over at his work station they chatted for a few moments. Clem returned with two onions and a business card. She looked determined as she cut into the bulb.

‘The plan was to minimise emotional attachment,’ she said softly, almost to herself. Then she wiped her eyes with the back of her sleeve.

‘Damn onions,’ she whispered.

In her car Daniela put on some Bob Dylan and turned up the volume. She drove towards Glebe, but she didn’t go home. Instead, she wound her way through the backstreets, admiring houses and trying to guess their value. She crossed over Parramatta Road through Chippendale, down past the seedy pubs and saggy terraces of Redfern and Darlington and on to the more expansive homes of Waterloo, then the leafy streets of Alexandria, Beaconsfield and Rosebery. They were all places she could live, she thought.

She would be attending some open-for-inspections on the weekend. Although the thought of buying a house was thrilling, she wasn’t certain she was ready. Once she made a commitment to her mortgage broker, it would be a death-do-us-part situation. It would mean thirty-plus years of honouring and obeying interest repayments. Extricating herself from that kind of financial partnership would be far more difficult than simply signing divorce papers. She wouldn’t even be able to open a register for gifts.

Suddenly she was furious for being exiled from her home; the home she had found and furnished and invited Simon to move into. If he was going to behave like this, he should be the one to leave. As she turned roughly into Glebe Point Road she felt the argument rising up inside her, the words were waiting to spew out. She pulled into her street. The lounge room light was on.

Good, she thought. Time to settle this.

Daniela wrenched the handbrake into place and cut the motor. She slammed her car door and charged up the stairs two at a time, and opened the front door, ready. And there, sitting on the couch, was Liz. There was knitting laid across her lap. She looked at Dani with placid eyes and put a finger to her lips.

‘He’s sleeping. How are you?’ she mouthed silently. Dani felt the anger drain out of her. Her resolve crumpled like a wet tissue and she slunk off to bed. Lying awake, she stared at the ceiling. The rage was gone, and in its place was a soggy pile of regret.

Jason called six times on Saturday, and twice on Sunday. He called once on Monday while Clem was at the cordon bleu class, and once on Tuesday. By Wednesday he seemed to have got the message that Clementine didn’t want to talk to him. She had stayed in all week in case he had come around, banging on her door again. But on Wednesday night, peeling an apple into the compost that contained the rotting remains of her birthday tulips, she decided enough was enough. She took Alistair’s business card from her wallet and invited herself out to dinner with him on Saturday night.

Alistair Papodakis had big eyes with dark pockets of skin beneath them that made him look like a mobster. But he was gentle and enterprising. Over lamb moussaka at a Hellenic restaurant Melanie Sissowitz had recommended, he told Clementine about his online phone-plan comparison website, Phoney.com.

‘Great name,’ said Clem. ‘How did you know you wanted to start an internet company? Did you study business?’

‘Would you believe I’m a student of the Classics? Euripides, Homer, Menander. There is not a great deal of money to be made from essays on Greek history, however. I was an impoverished bohemian who could not afford to pay his phone bill, and so Phoney was born out of necessity.’

Alistair ticked all the husband-hunting boxes. He was smart, successful, well-read, social and interesting. Clementine smiled and passed him more moussaka.

Her first appointment on Monday was with Gordon. He arrived with a shaved head.

‘Chemo has started again,’ he said. ‘I do this as a sign of solidarity.’

The white skin of his scalp was perforated where thousands of tiny hairs had started to break through.

‘How have you been this week? How’s Claire?’

He lowered himself wearily into a chair. ‘We’ve been arguing. We haven’t told the kids about the prognosis. Claire says she wants her last days with them to be happy, not filled with misery and fear.’

‘What do you think?’

‘I think I should give my dying wife what she wants,’ he said uneasily.

‘But?’

‘I — I worry about keeping them in the dark.’

Jodie and Lyle Carson were seven and nine. Jodie barely knew her mother unburdened by cancer.

‘I feel like they have a right to know that these few months … weeks with their mother are going to be their last.’

‘It’s a decision parents have to make together. A lot of people grapple with it. Are they being merciful or evasive, they wonder.’

‘It’s difficult to argue with someone who’s dying. It’s the ultimate trump card. Jodie doesn’t even fully understand what death is. When our rabbit Jack died, she kept asking when he was coming back from Heaven.’

‘Children are very sensitive,’ Clementine said. ‘They understand more than we know. They’ll detect a change.’

‘You think we should tell them?’

‘I think you should decide together what you think is right for your family.’

Clementine had been due to see Premendra after Gordon, but he had called to say he was tied up chasing executives. She was glad to have the hour to herself.

Since her mother was diagnosed, she had been having regular breast, ovary and cervical cancer screens, and despite more than a hundred clear tests she always felt the same stab of fear as she waited in the doctor’s office. Sometimes, months later, she would feel the pointed edge of anxiety press against her heart. She would imagine she had been feeling rundown and weak, and would find herself booking in another scan. All the while she would wonder: Who would take care of me?

In these waking nightmares it was her father who would care for her. And he would know how. He was a veteran of that unhappy art. Will had the boys. His wife, Bec, and Clem had never been close. Melanie Sissowitz would bring red wine and declare it medicinal. She supposed Daniela and Annabel would come and chat with her as she received treatment. If they got sick, she would do it for them. But it wasn’t the same thing as a family member.

She tried to imagine Alistair leaning over her bed to adjust her pillows. Somehow he didn’t fit. Nor did Jason — it was impossible to imagine him standing guard as she lay on her back in a gown. She could see herself, thin and weightless as her mother had been. In her mind’s eye there was a hand reaching out, comforting and melancholy in the pale-blue hospital room. But the face wasn’t Jason’s. It belonged to someone tall and blond.

Clem met Annabel and Daniela in the city at Barossa, for a lunch of their famous pig crackling and to sample their long list of Italian wines. Dani chose a vino rosso from Calabria.

‘How was your date? Is Alistair a potential husband?’ Annabel asked.

‘I don’t know,’ Clem shrugged.

‘Perhaps you should go to bed with him. Rid your system of Jason. An exorcism,’ Dani suggested.

‘Yes,’ said Annabel. ‘A few good orgasms will set you straight.’

‘It hardly seems worth it for one little orgasm,’ Clem said.

‘What do you mean?’ Dani asked.

‘Did Alistair look like he’d be all thumbs?’

‘No,’ Clementine shrank a little. ‘I can only ever have one a day.’

‘How long has this been going on?’ Annabel looked stricken.

‘Always,’ Clem shrugged. ‘I only seem to have enough gunpowder for one. Besides you don’t need to have an orgasm for the sex to be good.’

‘You don’t really believe that?’ said Dani.

‘Obviously an orgasm is preferable. But I have had really feeble sex that ended with a whimper of an orgasm. And I have had great, bed-shaking sex where I just haven’t been able to get there. Usually because I have already had one.’

‘I can’t believe you can only have one orgasm.’ Daniela was horrified.

‘You poor thing.’ Annabel looked as though she might cry.

‘It’s not that bad,’ Clementine said, defensively. ‘I make sure I have one every day. It balances out in the end. Do you have orgasms every day?’

Daniela looked at her lap. ‘Good point.’

‘It’s okay. It’s always been that way. Since my first time.’

‘When I was younger I had always imagined my first time would be with Harry Barchester,’ Annabel mused.

‘Maybe your last time will be with Harry Barchester,’ Clem said. ‘That’s better.’

‘Okay, brains trust,’ Annabel leaned forward. ‘Help me get a second date. Should I message him? What should I say? I know we’re supposed to play coy. But he’s a bit shell-shocked at the moment.’ She looked at them, waiting for advice.

‘Aren’t you supposed to wait to hear from him? Wasn’t that the rule?’ Dani said.

‘What if I don’t ask him out, I just send a message to plant myself in his mind?’

They spent the next few minutes drafting a message to Harry.

‘Make sure you ask a question,’ Clem said. ‘He has to write back if you ask a question.’

As soon as Annabel sent the message, she received a response.

‘Wow, he is keen,’ said Dani.

‘Oh, it’s not Harry. It’s Patrick.’

‘Patrick? Who’s Patrick?’

‘We met him at Mirabella’s wedding. He’s the one who told me about the Eve’s Garden project.’

‘And?’

‘And what?’

‘Do you have him in your crosshairs?’

‘Oh no, it’s not like that. Patrick’s too …’

‘What?’

‘I remember him,’ Clem said. ‘The botanist. He was wearing a beautiful flower. He was very interesting. Articulate.’

‘He’s not really my type,’ said Annabel.

‘What? Cultured? Worldly?’ said Dani.

‘We’re just friends,’ Annabel insisted.

‘I thought the whole husband-hunting premise was to find someone just like him. Likable and uncomplicated,’ said Daniela.

Annabel bit her nail and looked at her phone. It buzzed, heralding another message.

‘It’s Harry,’ she grinned. And Professor Patrick was not discussed again.

Clementine headed back to her office at 2pm. Lunch with her friends had restored her spirits, but when she got inside her building the positive feelings vanished. Her door was unlocked. She tried to remember whether she had locked it before leaving. She had been distracted lately, but surely not so much that she would leave all of these confidential files unprotected.

‘Hello?’ She pushed the door open slowly.

Leaning against her desk was Mirabella. She was dressed in a burgundy coat, with matching spiked high heels. She was stroking a pelt of fur around her neck.

‘Mirabella, what are you doing here? How did you get in?’

‘Clementine,’ she lunged at her and kissed each cheek. ‘Thank goodness you’re back — I’ve been simply desperate to speak to you.’

‘Is everything okay?’ Clem eyed her warily.

‘Humpty and I have been having awful troubles lately. But I don’t want to give up on the whole thing without really trying to work through our problems. I thought maybe you could help us … with some counselling.’

‘Problems? Mirabella, you’ve barely been married six weeks. I can’t possibly start marriage counselling when you still haven’t unpacked from your honeymoon. It’s just a post-wedding comedown. Very common, I assure you.’ Clementine took Mirabella by the elbow and tried to guide her towards the door, but she resisted.

‘But we need help.’ Mirabella took a handkerchief from her pocket and touched it to her eye. ‘We need an adjudicator. Someone independent to help us work through our differences.’

‘Mirabella, no counsellor in their right mind would begin conciliation with a couple who have been married for less than a trimester.’

‘We need counselling, Clementine,’ she said. ‘Sometimes our differences feel so … irreconcilable.’

Clem eyed her. ‘Mirabella, that’s the language of divorce. Don’t tell me—’

‘But that’s why we need your help, you see.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Clem shook her head. ‘Even if you did start seeing me, I’m hardly an independent third party. I’ve known you more than twenty years.’

Mirabella straightened herself and took a deep breath. ‘Well, then,’ she said, ‘I suppose I’ll just have to find someone else. Honestly, it seems nobody values the sanctity of marriage any more.’ Mirabella’s voice changed, and she said each word slowly and deliberately.

‘What do you mean?’ Clementine watched Mirabella tuck her handkerchief away in her handbag and take off her gloves.

‘My dear friend Amanda Ceravic is going through the same thing I am with Humpty. She arrived on our doorstep positively inconsolable the other day.’

Clementine suddenly felt like she was standing on a hotplate and somebody had turned the heat up.

‘She thought her husband was having an affair.’ Mirabella started walking towards Clem.

‘Really?’

‘Bizarre, I know. What man in his right mind would cheat on Amanda Ceravic?’

‘What man indeed?’

‘The thing is, she found this in his car.’

Mirabella held up her hand. Clinging to the fourth finger was a rose-gold filigree ring.

‘The poor thing was hysterical, so naturally I told her it was mine and that I had been looking for it since the day Jason drove us all to Icebergs for her birthday last month. It’s a lovely piece. Antique. An heirloom, I’d imagine.’

Mirabella had her ring. She knew her secret.

‘Anyway, I’d better be off. I need to find someone who will help me fight to save my marriage.’

‘Mirabella — wait.’

‘Yes?’ She turned in a swoosh of red curls.

‘I have an opening on Friday,’ Clementine said quietly.